McGuigan tells Freddie to quit

Barry McGuigan hopes that Andrew Flintoff will not step back into the boxing ring having won on his professional debut against Richard Dawson.

Despite being knocked down in the second round, the former England cricketer scored a narrow points victory over Dawson in his four-round contest against Dawson at the MEN Arena on Friday night.

Victory capped a remarkable journey for Flintoff who, with no prior boxing experience to speak of, had been trained for his professional outing by former world champion McGuigan and his son Shane.

However, whilst proud of his charge's achievement, McGuigan is keeping his fingers crossed that Flintoff has now scratched his boxing itch and will not look to fight again.

"I just hope he doesn't want to do it anymore because it was such a tough, difficult job to get him into that type of shape," McGuigan told Sky Sports. "He worked exceptionally hard but it was a real trial.

"But could we reproduce this, let's say for example if he wanted to go to America? I don't think we could."

McGuigan went on to admit, though, that any decision to continue or not with his boxing odyssey would be down to Flintoff and acknowledged he would reprise his role as trainer should the 34-year-old choose to carry on.

"He's such a loveable lad, everybody loves him, the support he has is extraordinary, but I don't know that he should be doing it again to be perfectly honest," he continued.

"But that decision is his decision and if he wanted to do it I would want to protect him as best I could and help him as much as I could."